The Climate Show #33: Salinger, carbon carnage and recursive fury

In this week’s news-packed edition of The Climate Show we have an exclusive interview with Jim Salinger, probably New Zealand’s highest profile climate scientist, talking about extremes and the shape of things to come. John Cook discusses his new paper with Stephan Lewandowsky, Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, which is already upsetting climate cranks around the world, plus we look at carbon bubbles, renewable energy beating coal on price, and a simply superb iPad app.

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I have known a considerable variety of conspiracy theorists but with respect to climate science my first such experience was with a person on the net whom I suspected of being a professional denialist (ahem – part of a conspiracy!?) and was simply exploiting this weakness in immature minds. I did not try to argue against his conspiracy theories, usually a mistake, but generated a rhetorical outburst expressing astonishment that he should even try to entertain such notions. Now a bit of rhetoric can be motivationally powerful. The effect was to invite others to jump into the thread also deploring this device. That stopped him on conspiracy theory for about a year. A second dose seemed to stop him for good with respect to that particular thread which ran on for a number of years.